In computing, the Windows registry is a database which stores settings and options for the operating system for Microsoft Windows 32-bit versions. It contains information and settings for all the hardware, software, users, and preferences of the PC. Whenever a user makes changes to "Control Panel" settings, or file associations, system policies, or installed software, the changes are reflected and stored in the registry.

On Windows 9x computers, an older installation can have a very large registry that slows down the computer's startup and can make the computer unstable. This has led to frequent criticisms that the registry leads to instability. However, these problems do not usually occur on the Windows NT family of systems, including Windows XP
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The Windows API is the name given by Microsoft to the core set of application programming interfaces available in the Microsoft Windows operating systems. It is designed for usage by C/C++ programs and is the most direct way to interact with a Windows system for software applications. Lower level access to a Windows system, mostly required for device drivers, is provided by the Windows Driver Model in current versions of Windows.

A software development kit (SDK) is available for Windows, which provides documentation and tools to enable developers to create software using the Windows API and associated Windows technologies.
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Any hacker tool intended to disable a user's personal firewall. Some will also disable resident anti-virus software

A program that overloads a connection by any mechanism, such as fast pinging, causing a DoS attack

A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is one that pits many machines against a single victim. An example is the attacks of February 2000 against some of the biggest websites. Even though these websites have a theoretical bandwidth of a gigabit/second, distributing many agents throughout the Internet flooding them with traffic can bring them down. The Internet is defenseless against these attacks. The best defense is to run spyware software, and remove DDoS clients when they are found, so that their machines are not used as attack tools. Another approach is for ISPs to do "egress filtering": prevent packets from going outbound that do not originate from IP addresses assigned to the ISP. This cuts down on the problem of spoofed IP addresses